Occupy Wall Street: The Right's smear machine goes to work

[CarrieLynne]

The Seattle cab driver pulled over and given a ticket, for the offense of honking his horn to support Occupy Seattle, was hit with a greater penalty than bank and home mortgage executives who set off America's Great Recession.

Is it any wonder that national opinion surveys -- the latest, a CBS News/New York Times poll -- show a plurality of Americans supporting the goals of nationwide protests dubbed Occupy Wall Street?

The protests have alarmed the country's right-wing media and its wealthy keeper-manipulators. The tireless promoters of the Tea Party "citizen" protest in 2009 have set out to discredit what has in 2011 become a big, spontaneous -- if loosely organized -- citizen protest.

* The Fox News Channel is raising an old bugaboo that a former leader of ACORN -- the disbanded community action group -- plays a key "behind the scenes" role in the New York protests. Fox has falsely reported that a group called New Yorkers Committed for Change is paying people to protest.

* Rush Limbaugh is labeling the demonstrators as "pure genuine parasites," "bored trust-fund kids," "this parade of human debris" and "perpetually lazy, spoiled rotten, 99 percent white kids." (I wonder if he would use that phrase to describe the 24-year-old Iraq war veteran seriously injured in the Oakland protest.)

* Ex-Bush guru Karl Rove, in a recent Bellevue appearance, described the Occupy Wall Street encampment as composed of "self-described socialists, anarchists," and even "anti-Semites."

* The Massachusetts Republican Party is labeling Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren a "matriarch of mayhem." Architect of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Warren has voiced sympathy for the protesters.


Read more: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/connelly/article/Occupy-Wall-Street-The-right-s-smear-machine-2240034.php#ixzz1c88L4ZpB

[MADem]

1. I am surprised it took them this long.

These assertions need to be answered. The movement needs spokespeople who can refute this kind of crap point by point, even if they refuse "leaders."

Anyone who thinks this will go away, or get better, is whistling in the dark. This is just the beginning.

[brewens]

2. Just who does Rush think "trust-fund kids" are? I'd be willing to

bet most would be conservative and against OWS.

[pa28]

3. So ACORN, Nazis, anarchists and spoiled brats are secretly conspiring to create "mayhem"?

[butterfly77]

4. ...

[MedleyMisty]

5. I wonder if they'll borrow some of Gaddafi's lines

My favorite bit of Gaddafi's propaganda was when he said that Al Qaeda was slipping drugs into the youth's Nescafe, and that they would all be forgiven and given drug rehab if they turned themselves in.

[ck4829]

6. I guess they realized that calling them all "hippies" made them look like dinosaurs. K&R.